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Leave it to Pete Hegseth, the ex-Fox News host now leading the Pentagon, to reframe the massive US-Israeli military operation in Iran as an act of resistance against political correctness: the first based regime-change war of the Maga era.
In a combative press conference at the Pentagon on Monday, Hegseth brought his anti-PC ethos to defend exactly what Donald Trump has said he did not want: to embroil the US in a major intervention in the Middle East with no clear timeline for exit.
But this won’t be like the last generation’s wars, Hegseth insisted. Operation Epic Fury was being fought “on our terms, with maximum authorities”, and without our “traditional allies who wring their hands and clutch their pearls hemming and hawing about the use of force”.
When it comes to war fighting, the Trump administration are the children of the US forever wars in the Middle East. Both Hegseth and JD Vance served in Iraq, and Trump has often prided himself on being a persistent critic of that war.
Vance in particular has been a weather vane for the administration’s creep toward military action, warning in a Washington Post interview against “overlearning the lessons of the past. Just because one president screwed up a military conflict doesn’t mean we can never engage in military conflict again.”
By Monday, both Hegseth and Trump himself had said that they wouldn’t rule out putting boots on the ground – leaving open the potential for a mission creep, despite their boasts that they were not in Iran to enable a democratic transition, let alone to engage in “nation-building”. And the Israeli strikes in Lebanon, as well as the Iranian ballistic missile strikes across the region and the deaths of four US service members, indicated that the war could grow into a regional conflict.
But Hegseth was adamant that this time, things were different.
“This is not Iraq. This is not endless. I was there for both,” he said. “Our generation knows better, and so does this president. He called the last 20 years of nation-building wars dumb, and he’s right. This is the opposite.”
The real problem, Hegseth suggested, was not that the US was drawn into a protracted war in the Middle East on false pretenses of eliminating a global threat. Senior administration officials this weekend briefed that the US had to attack Iran because its ballistic missiles represented an “intolerable” threat and that Iran was preparing for a pre-emptive strike. (In briefings to Congress, Trump administration officials did not suggest there was an imminent strike, and publicly Israel has said they began the war because of an “operational opportunity” to kill Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran).
But the administration has learned different lessons from the Iraq war. Hegseth indicated that the rules and goals dictating the military in Iraq were the real problem: too focused on a democratic transition, too restrictive in allowing the US to go in with full force. This time, he said, there would be “no stupid rules of engagement, no nation building quagmire, no democracy-building exercise, no politically correct wars”.
What the US really needed was a leader with fewer rules, with the capacity to execute at will, and without a code that would prevent him from doing so.
“What [Trump] has shown the ability to do that other presidents can’t quite seem to have the aperture to do – Joe Biden didn’t even know what he was doing – is to look for opportunities and off-ramps and escalations for the United States that creates new opportunities to execute what we need on our own timeline,” Hegseth added, without giving any firm timeline to when US troops could declare mission accomplished.
Trump’s constantly shifting rhetoric has left observers confused as to what the US plan in Iran is. In the last 48 hours, the president has told reporters in phone calls that the war may take several days or that he planned to go on for four weeks, that the US had identified several potential successors to Khamenei and then that the initial strikes had in fact killed all of them.
But this press conference – the first by an administration official in the more than 48 hours since the conflict began – was not really about specifics. It was mood music to show that the administration was defiant, as Hegseth dodged straightforward questions about the US timeline to leave Iran, whether the US would put troops on the ground and what Trump would consider to having achieved US objectives.
When asked by NBC News whether the administration would stick to a four-week timeline as suggested by Trump himself, Hegseth called that a “typical NBC sort of gotcha type question”. Then, he said, it could last two weeks, four weeks, or six weeks.
“We fight to win, and we don’t waste time or lives, as the president warned, an effort of this scope will include casualties. War is hell, and always will be,” Hegseth added.
